Linked List: January 20, 2022

Thursday, 20 January 2022

Stephen Hackett: ‘Apple Should Bring Back Dashboard’ ★

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time. Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface.

Notification Center is a real mess. Even on a Pro Display XDR, you get three visible notifications. That’s it. Anything older is hidden behind a button, regardless of how many widgets you may have in the lower section of the Notification Center column.

Apple needs to rethink this and let this new class of widgets breathe, being able to use the entire screen like the widgets of yore could. Bringing back Dashboard is an obvious solution here, and I’d love to see it make a return.

It’s really interesting that the modern SwiftUI widgets are compatible across MacOS and both flavors of iOS (iPhone and iPad). But forcing them into Notification Center on MacOS is poorly considered. The Mac has bigger displays than any iPad, yet has less screen real estate for visible widgets than an iPhone. I also think today’s widgets are going to get more useful with each successive year (interactive elements, etc.).

Bringing back Dashboard would be one solution. Hackett links to an interesting thread on Twitter where other ideas are being tossed out, like putting them on the desktop or inside Launchpad. Apple really needs to do something on this front. Widgets are good and useful.

Apple Names Kristin Huguet Head of PR ★

John Paczkowski, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

Apple has tapped a new head of PR: longtime company spokesperson Kristin Huguet. She’ll replace Stella Low, former communications chief at networking giant Cisco, who joined Apple in May 2021.

An Apple veteran, Huguet has been with the company since 2005, working under former SVPs Katie Cotton and Steve Dowling. She’s worked under CEOs Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, and her tenure has included some of the company’s most high-profile public relations challenges — a pitched battle with the FBI over iPhone encryption and, more recently, a widely publicized spat with Fortnite maker Epic Games over its App Store practices.

Huguet will report directly to Cook. Her new gig starts immediately.

I was slightly surprised they named an outsider last year. And I’m not surprised now that Low didn’t last. May to January is just 1⅓ Browetts.

‘Heat 2’ – Upcoming Novel by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner ★

I nearly plotzed yesterday when I saw Michael Mann tweet a trailer for Heat 2, but it’s a novel, not a movie. Still, an insta-buy for me.

Mike Fleming Jr., writing for Deadline:

Michael Mann is ready to rip on Heat 2, a novel he has written with Edgar-winner Meg Gardiner that expands the tapestry of his 1995 crime classic film. The surprise here: the novel coming August 9 from William Morrow through the HarperCollins-based Michael Mann Books imprint will tell an original story about the lives of the characters in that movie both before and after the events depicted in the movie.

Modular AI – New Startup Co-Founded by Chris Lattner ★

I saw that Lattner left SiFive this month — was wondering what was next. (Lattner created the LLVM compiler project before joining Apple and the Swift programming language while at Apple.) From Modular AI’s home page:

The next generation of product breakthroughs will be powered by production quality infrastructure that brings together the best of compilers and runtimes, is designed for heterogeneous compute, edge to datacenter distribution, and is focused on usability. Unifying software and hardware with a “just works” approach that will save developers enormous time and increase their velocity.

We believe the fundamental research is done — but we just need a first-principles re-architecture of our systems. We need a team that is motivated to solve the “big problem” in a disciplined way and an architecture that deploys to both large and small systems alike.

Modular AI is that team - solving that problem.

Lattner, on Twitter:

After spending years working on AI/ML infrastructure, Modular AI is finally going to build it right. It is time for the best SW architects, engineers and product leaders to come together to lift the world’s ML compute.